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Meme
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, extended his notion that the gene is the sight of natural selection (and there by evolution) rather than the organism out of the study of genetic biology into cultural and social studies by proposing that thoughts, actions, and social practices were also subject to natural selection. He imagined a unit of thought or practice that would be transmitted through cultural learning and communities of shared culture, and called this imaginary unit a "meme", after his favorite packet of information the gene. However theoretical this notion that ideas or practices form recombinant packets of data that we transmit between each other (and however dubious his intentions in extending this theory, given his outspoken atheism and immediate association of religion with a virus of the mind), the natives of the internets have glomped onto the meme like a weeaboo to Johnny Yong Bosch. Through their own usage of the word and the befuddlement of outsiders to examine the work critically, memes have become the cultural capital of internet folk. Without memes, many fear, nothing stands between them and the rest of the mundanes that walk these hallowed grounds. But the battle for the meme is all but lost. thumb|400px|left|First, it would be l'Internet Mélange, then it would be Mélange du Internet, then it would become clear that all your internet capital has turned to internet Monopoly money. But these things barely belong at the center of an internet laugh economy anyway, because the laugh they create is a laugh that heals and delights: they do not create lulz. Memes are no long the in jokes of clever basement dwellers but are big business. As the internet becomes the realm of pop culture (as people who are openly anti-nerd and even anti-computer migrate to sites like Facebook or YouTube), the meme becomes a commercial investment rather than the ass-backwards gift economy of internet natives. The forced meme spreads rampant; it gets packaged as authentic internet stuff on sites trying to make cheez off the wasted time of others. An Example: The Life of an Image Macro Take "Disney Hipster" for instance. It begins an image or a character that people might recognize: People recognize the image or the character, and they have some associations with it. Now add a new element to the character or image, something that carries associations of its own that pushes or pulls against the association of the original image to create juxtaposition: Now, add some text to complete the juxtaposition and makes up the funnies: At this point, hopefully it's funny (not lulzy, but that's fine). The funnies will not last long as the internet is flooded with cool people who want to image macro their own. Srsly though, it won't be long before this thing moves into cats: And from there it drops off pretty fast. From February to March of 2011, this garden for giggles bloomed, stunk, and withered. The only way for it to come back is if cute girls (who for the most part have no business being on the internet except for camwhoring) do some cosplay to ratchet the meme back up. Notice in these last two the presence of captioning text. This is one of the very real but often overlooked problems of moving image macros across the virtual mediating barrier between the human world and the world of computers talknig to themselves: text is encoded and imbedded in ways that are problematic for real life stuff. While it creates problems socializing this type of humor,it also resists outsiders' interest in co-opting or reappropriating that humor for their own extra-internets goals. In part this is why sites like can has cheezburger are so dangerous to the natives and their happy guffawing: by remaining in digital medium, they can exploit the funnys of image macros unchecked, selling advertisement space and cultural items (like novelty t-shirts and books) that are well adapt to the unique text-embedding giggle machines image marco like internet digital interfacing &c. T-shirts and the like are gravy compared to the advertisement revenue generated through these sites just by looking at them. Personally, I'm not raging after this image macro. It's ok, and I like girls with glasses. tl;dr image macros is funs for the whole familys This Image Macro Says A Lot About This Wiki